Major Problems in American History Volume II: Since 1865

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Major Problems in AmericanHistory, Volume II: Since 1865,Documents and Essays,Third EditionElizabeth Cobbs Hoffman,Edward J. Blum, Jon Gjerde

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CHAPTER 1

Reconstruction

Even before the Civil War was over, President Lincoln and congressional leaders began topuzzle over how best to reintegrate the people of the South into the Union. Before he wasassassinated, President Lincoln proposed the “10 percent plan,” which would have alloweda state government to reestablish itself once one-tenth of those who had voted in 1860 tookan oath of loyalty to the United States. Radicals in Congress were appalled by the seem-ingly lenient plan and pushed through their own bill, which increased the proportion toone-half of the voters who were required to swear that they had never supported secession.Lincoln’s assassination cut short this increasingly scathing debate and drastically altered themood of Reconstruction. According to poet Herman Melville, the assassination shifted thenorthern mood. “They have killed him, The Forgiver,” Melville versed, “The Avengertakes his place.” What really took Lincoln’s place was conflict and chaos for nearly fifteenyears. Political disagreements over Reconstruction policy were vast, and the strategies advo-cated were so varied that Reconstruction took a crooked road. As approaches to rebuildingthe South shifted, the hopes among some to transform southern society grew and then weredashed. Ultimately, despite important legal precedents that were made in the era, many ofthe social, political, and economic conventions that had characterized antebellum societyendured after Reconstruction ended. Eventually, the racial system of segregation came toreplace the system of slavery.

Although people differed on what was the best policy for Reconstruction, everyoneagreed that the Confederate states were in dire straits and the primary goal of Reconstruc-tion was to reincorporate those states politically and socially into the Union. The war haddevastated the South: entire cities lay in ruins; two-thirds of southern railroads had beendestroyed; and at least one-third of its livestock had disappeared. Likewise, the abolition ofslavery unalterably transformed southern society at the same time that it gave hope to peoplefreed from their bondage (known as freedmen). Following Lincoln’s death, many believedthat Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln as president, would advocate a severe Recon-struction of the South. Instead, Johnson engineered a plan that seemed to many North-erners as much too charitable. Ironically, Johnson’s course of action, combined with theintransigence of unrepentant Southern leaders, was a major force in bringing about the eraof Radical Reconstruction beginning in 1866. Because he was so impolitic, Johnsonstrengthened the resolve of Congress to enact a more radical policy. After the Republican

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Party won a resounding victory in the elections of 1866, Congress reconvened in 1867and set out to punish rebellious southern whites while offering more rights and freedomsto African Americans.

If Reconstruction was engineered in Washington, new social conventions were forgedin the South that would be extremely important in the future. The lives of former slaveswere dramatically changed and freedmen expressed their understanding of freedom in a va-riety of ways. Significantly, many African Americans played important roles in the newRepublican Party of the South, and by 1868 black men were seated for the first time insouthern state legislatures. These political gains, however, were short-lived. In spite of theelectoral successes of African Americans, the Democratic Party enjoyed increasing politicalsuccess in the South as former Confederates eventually had their political rights restored.Changes in the electorate in conjunction with intimidation shifted the trajectory of Recon-struction once again as radical transformation was replaced with a movement toward thewhite South’s term for reclaiming the world they had known before the Civil War.

The end of Reconstruction was hastened by events in the North as well as the South.Ulysses S. Grant, elected president in 1868, was a better general than politician and hisadministration was already mired in scandal shortly after he took office. By 1873, thenation was rocked by a financial panic that led Americans into a depression lasting sixyears. Scandal and depression weakened the Republican Party. Meanwhile Congress andthe Supreme Court were weakening in their resolve to continue a strict policy of Reconstruc-tion. The death knell of Reconstruction was the national election of 1876, when it becameclear that the North was no longer willing to pursue its earlier goals. The election of theDemocratic candidate for president was avoided only by a compromise in 1877 whereinRutherford B. Hayes would be declared president if he promised to withdraw federal troopsfrom those states in the South where they still remained. The deal was made. Reconstruc-tion was over—northern and southern whites agreed that national reunion was more im-portant than the defense of civil rights for black men and women.

Q U E S T I O N S T O T H I N K A B O U T

What were the failures of Reconstruction and what were its successes? Why did itcollapse, to the extent that it did? How successful was the Union in reincorporatingthe southern states and people? Did Reconstruction come to an end primarily be-cause the North abandoned it or because it was opposed by the South? How didAfrican Americans feel about the possibilities and the terrors of Reconstruction?

D O C U M E N T S

The first three documents represent the diversity of feelings at the end of the warregarding the federal government and rights for African Americans. Document 1is an oration given by William Howard Day, an African American minister, in1865. Notice how—unlike African Americans before the Civil War—he nowcelebrated the federal government. Day proclaimed the Fourth of July as “our

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day,” the United States as “our nation,” and Washington, D.C., as “our capital.”In the South, though, many whites opposed the federal government and wantedto keep former slaves as second-class citizens. Document 2 is a song from theSouth where the white vocalist proclaims his hatred for the federal government.In law, many southern states enacted “black codes” immediately after the war,one of which is given in document 3. This example from Louisiana in 1865 il-lustrates the many ways in which the rights of “freedom” was abridged. The nexttwo documents showcase conflict within the federal government over Recon-struction. In document 4, President Andrew Johnson argues against black suf-frage. In contrast, Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical representative in Congress,argues for passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 in document 5 becausehe believes that only an unfaltering federal presence will prevent “traitors”from ruling the South. The bitterness that ensued resulted in the impeachmentof President Andrew Johnson. Document 6, the opening argument in the im-peachment trial, enumerates the accusations against President Johnson. Thenext two documents show frustrations with the civil rights agendas of Recon-struction. In document 7, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—an antebellum feminist andabolitionist—argues that the very radicals who are pushing for increased rights forfreed slaves are deferring the issue of women’s suffrage. Document 8 is the testi-mony of a freed woman about the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. The final twodocuments detail sectional feelings at the end of Reconstruction. Document 9 isa poem from Father Abram Ryan, a Catholic priest of the South. It illustrates theenduring notion of a “lost cause” and love for the Confederate States of Americathat was maintained by many white southerners well after reconstruction. “TheBlue and the Gray,” another Reconstruction poem, is document 10. It expressesthe hopes for North-South reconciliation in the form of mutual love and respectfor white Union and Confederate soldiers.

1. William Howard Day, an African American Minister, Salutesthe Nation and a Monument to Abraham Lincoln, 1865

… We meet under new and ominous circumstances to-day. We come to theNational Capital—our Capital—with new hopes, new prospects, new joys, inview of the future and past of the people; and yet with that joy fringed, tinged,permeated by a sorrow unlike any, nationally, we have ever known. A fewweeks since all that was mortal of Abraham Lincoln was laid away to rest. Andto-day, after the funeral cortege has passed, weeping thoughts march throughour hearts—when the muffled drum has ceased to beat in a procession fivehundred, aye, two thousand miles long, the chambers of your souls are stillechoing the murmur—and though the coffin has been lowered into its place,“dust to dust,” there ever falls across our way the coffin’s shadow, and, standingin it, we come to-day to rear a monument to his blessed memory, and again to

Celebration by the Colored People’s Educational Monument Association (1865).

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pledge our untiring resistance to the tyranny by which he fell, whether it be inthe iron manacles of the slave, or in the unjust written manacles for the free….

Up to now our nation,… [t]he shout of the freeman and the wail of thebondman have, I repeat, always been heard together, making “harsh discords.”Hitherto a damning crime has run riot over the whole land. North and Southalike were inoculated with its virus. It has lain like a gangrene upon the nationallife, until the nation, mortified, broke in twain. The hand of slavery evermoulded the Christianity of the nation, and wrote the national songs. Whathand wrote the laws of the nation and marked this National District all overwith scars? What hand went into the Capitol and half murdered Charles Sumner,nature’s nobleman?…

All the heroes of all the ages, bond and free, have labored to secure for usthe right we rejoice in to-day. To the white and colored soldiers of this war, ledon as they were by our noble President and other officers, in the presence ofsome of whom I rejoice to-day, are we indebted, in the providence of God,for our present position. For want of time, I pass by any more detailed mentionof the noble men and their noble deeds. Together they nobly labored—togetherthey threw themselves into the breach which rebellion had made across the land,and thus closed up that breach forever. And now, in their presence, living anddead, as over the prostrate form of our leader, Abraham Lincoln—by the edge ofblood-red waves, still surging, we pledge our resistance to tyranny, (I repeat,)whether in the iron manacles of the slave, or in the unjust written manacles ofthe free….

It is related in the diary of one of the writers of old that when the slave tradewas at its height, a certain vessel loaded with its human freight started under thefrown of God and came over the billows of the ocean. Defying God and man alike,in the open daylight, the slave was brought up from the hold and chained to thefoot of the mast. The eye of the Omnipotent saw it, and bye and bye the thundersmuttered and the lightnings played over the devoted vessel. At length the lightningleaped upon the mast and shivered it, and, as it did this, also melted the fetter whichfastened the black slave to it; and he arising unhurt, for the first time walked thedeck a free man.

Our ship of state, the Union, has for eighty years gone careering over thebillows; our slave has been chained to our mast in the open daylight, and in thefocal blaze of the eighteen centuries gone by, and we have hurried on in ourcrime regardless alike of the muttering of the thunder and the flashes of the lightn-ing, until in one devoted hour the thunderbolt was sped from the hand of God.The mast was shivered; the ship was saved; but, thank God, the slave was free….

2. A Southern Song Opposes Reconstruction, c. 1860s

O, I’m a good old Rebel,

Now that’s just what I am,

“O, I’m a Good Old Rebel,” c. 1860s.



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For this “Fair Land of Freedom”

I do not care at all;

I’m glad I fit against it–

I only wish we’d won,

And I don’t want no pardon

For anything I done.

I hates the Constitution,

This Great Republic too,

I hates the Freedman’s Buro,

In uniforms of blue;

I hates the nasty eagle,

With all his brags and fuss,

The lyin’, thievin’ Yankees,

I hates ‘em wuss and wuss.

I hates the Yankee nation

And everything they do,

I hates the Declaration

Of Independence too;

I hates the glorious Union –

‘Tis dripping with our blood –

I hates their striped banner,

I fit it all I could.…

Three hundred thousand Yankees

Is stiff in Southern dust;

We got three hundred thousand

Before they conquered us;

They died of Southern fever

And Southern steel and shot,

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I wish they was three million

Instead of what we got.

I can’t take up my musket

And fight ‘em now no more,

But I ain’t going to love ‘em,

Now that is sarten sure;

And I don’t want no pardon

For what I was and am,

I won’t be reconstructed

And I don’t care a damn.

3. Louisiana Black Codes Reinstate Provisionsof the Slave Era, 1865

Section 1. Be it therefore ordained by the board of police of the town of Opelousas. Thatno negro or freedman shall be allowed to come within the limits of the town ofOpelousas without special permission from his employers, specifying the objectof his visit and the time necessary for the accomplishment of the same….

Section 2. Be it further ordained, That every negro freedman who shall befound on the streets of Opelousas after 10 o’clock at night without a writtenpass or permit from his employer shall be imprisoned and compelled to workfive days on the public streets, or pay a fine of five dollars.

Section 3. No negro or freedman shall be permitted to rent or keep a housewithin the limits of the town under any circumstances, and any one thus offend-ing shall be ejected and compelled to find an employer or leave the town withintwenty-four hours….

Section 4. No negro or freedman shall reside within the limits of the townof Opelousas who is not in the regular service of some white person or formerowner, who shall be held responsible for the conduct of said freedman….

Section 5. No public meetings or congregations of negroes or freedmenshall be allowed within the limits of the town of Opelousas under any circum-stances or for any purpose without the permission of the mayor or president ofthe board….

Section 6. No negro or freedman shall be permitted to preach, exhort, orotherwise declaim to congregations of colored people without a special permis-sion from the mayor or president of the board of police….

Condition of the South, Senate Executive Document No. 2, 39 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 92–93.



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Section 7. No freedman who is not in the military service shall be allowedto carry firearms, or any kind of weapons, within the limits of the town of Ope-lousas without the special permission of his employer, in writing, and approvedby the mayor or president of the board of police….

Section 8. No freedman shall sell, barter, or exchange any articles of mer-chandise or traffic within the limits of Opelousas without permission in writingfrom his employer or the mayor or president of the board….

Section 9. Any freedman found drunk within the limits of the town shallbe imprisoned and made to labor five days on the public streets, or pay five dol-lars in lieu of said labor.

Section 10. Any freedman not residing in Opelousas who shall be foundwithin the corporate limits after the hour of 3 p.m. on Sunday without a specialpermission from his employer or the mayor shall be arrested and imprisoned andmade to work….

Section 11. All the foregoing provisions apply to freedmen andfreedwomen….

E. D. ESTILLETTE,President of the Board of Police.JOS. D. RICHARDS, Clerk.

Official copy:

J. LOVELL,Captain and Assistant Adjutant General.

4. President Andrew Johnson Denounces Changesin His Program of Reconstruction, 1867

It is manifestly and avowedly the object of these laws to confer upon negroes theprivilege of voting and to disfranchise such a number of white citizens as willgive the former a clear majority at all elections in the Southern States. This, tothe minds of some persons, is so important that a violation of the Constitution isjustified as a means of bringing it about. The morality is always false which ex-cuses a wrong because it proposes to accomplish a desirable end. We are notpermitted to do evil that good may come. But in this case the end itself is evil,as well as the means. The subjugation of the States to negro domination wouldbe worse than the military despotism under which they are now suffering. It wasbelieved beforehand that the people would endure any amount of military op-pression for any length of time rather than degrade themselves by subjection tothe negro race. Therefore they have been left without a choice. Negro suffragewas established by act of Congress, and the military officers were commanded to

Andrew Johnson, “Third Annual Message” (December 3, 1867), in A Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents,1789–1897, VI, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1899), 564–565.

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superintend the process of clothing the negro race with the political privilegestorn from white men.

The blacks in the South are entitled to be well and humanely governed, andto have the protection of just laws for all their rights of person and property. If itwere practicable at his time to give them a Government exclusively their own,under which they might manage their own affairs in their own way, it wouldbecome a grave question whether we ought to do so, or whether common hu-manity would not require us to save them from themselves. But under the cir-cumstances this is only a speculative point. It is not proposed merely that theyshall govern themselves, but that they shall rule the white race, make and admin-ister State laws, elect Presidents and members of Congress, and shape to a greateror less extent the future destiny of the whole country. Would such a trust andpower be safe in such hands?

The peculiar qualities which should characterize any people who are fit todecide upon the management of public affairs for a great state have seldom beencombined. It is the glory of white men to know that they have had thesequalities in sufficient measures to build upon this continent a great political fabricand to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other partof the world all similar experiments have failed. But if anything can be proved byknown facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be ac-knowledged that in the progress of nations negroes have shown less capacityfor government than any other race of people. No independent government ofany form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever theyhave been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency torelapse into barbarism. In the Southern States, however, Congress has under-taken to confer upon them the privilege of the ballot. Just released from slavery,it may be doubted whether as a class they know more than their ancestors howto organize and regulate civil society.

5. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens Demands aRadical Reconstruction, 1867

…. It is to be regretted that inconsiderate and incautious Republicans shouldever have supposed that the slight amendments [embodied in the pending Four-teenth Amendment] already proposed to the Constitution, even when incorpo-rated into that instrument, would satisfy the reforms necessary for the security ofthe Government. Unless the rebel States, before admission, should be made re-publican in spirit, and placed under the guardianship of loyal men, all our bloodand treasure will have been spent in vain. I waive now the question of punish-ment which, if we are wise, will still be inflicted by moderate confiscations, bothas a reproof and example. Having these States, as we all agree, entirely within thepower of Congress, it is our duty to take care that no injustice shall remain in

Thaddeus Stevens, speech in the House (January 3, 1867), Congressional Globe, 39 Cong., 2 Sess., Vol. 37, pt. 1,pp. 251–253. This document can also be found in Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, ed. Harold M. Hyman (Indiana-polis, Ind., and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 373–375.



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their organic laws. Holding them “like clay in the hands of the potter,” we mustsee that no vessel is made for destruction. Having now no governments, theymust have enabling acts. The law of last session with regard to Territories settledthe principles of such acts. Impartial suffrage, both in electing the delegates andratifying their proceedings, is now the fixed rule. There is more reason why col-ored voters should be admitted in the rebel States than in the Territories. In theStates they form the great mass of the loyal men. Possibly with their aid loyalgovernments may be established in most of those States. Without it all are sureto be ruled by traitors; and loyal men, black and white, will be oppressed, exiled,or murdered. There are several good reasons for the passage of this bill. In thefirst place, it is just. I am now confining my argument to negro suffrage in therebel States. Have not loyal blacks quite as good a right to choose rulers andmake laws as rebel whites? In the second place, it is a necessity in order to pro-tect the loyal white men in the seceded States. The white Union men are in agreat minority in each of those States. With them the blacks would act ina body; and it is believed that in each of said States, except one, the two unitedwould form a majority, control the States, and protect themselves. Now they arethe victims of daily murder. They must suffer constant persecution or be exiled.The convention of southern loyalists, lately held in Philadelphia, almost unani-mously agreed to such a bill as an absolute necessity.

Another good reason is, it would insure the ascendancy of the Union party.Do you avow the party purpose? exclaims some horror-stricken demagogue.I do. For I believe, on my conscience, that on the continued ascendancy ofthat party depends the safety of this great nation. If impartial suffrage is excludedin rebel States then every one of them is sure to send a solid rebel representativedelegation to Congress, and cast a solid rebel electoral vote. They, with theirkindred Copperheads of the North, would always elect the President and controlCongress. While slavery sat upon her defiant throne, and insulted and intimi-dated the trembling North, the South frequently divided on questions of policybetween Whigs and Democrats, and gave victory alternately to the sections.Now, you must divide them between loyalists, without regard to color, and dis-loyalists, or you will be the perpetual vassals of the free-trade, irritated, revenge-ful South. For these, among other reasons, I am for negro suffrage in every rebelState. If it be just, it should not be denied; if it be necessary, it should beadopted; if it be a punishment to traitors, they deserve it.

But it will be said, as it has been said, “This is negro equality!” What is ne-gro equality, about which so much is said by knaves, and some of which is be-lieved by men who are not fools? It means, as understood by honestRepublicans, just this much, and no more: every man, no matter what his raceor color; every earthly being who has an immortal soul, has an equal right tojustice, honesty, and fair play with every other man; and the law should securehim those rights. The same law which condemns or acquits an African shouldcondemn or acquit a white man. The same law which gives a verdict in a whiteman’s favor should give a verdict in a black man’s favor on the same state of facts.Such is the law of God and such ought to be the law of man. This doctrine doesnot mean that a negro shall sit on the same seat or eat at the same table with a

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white man. That is a matter of taste which every man must decide for himself.The law has nothing to do with it.

6. Representative Benjamin Butler Argues That PresidentAndrew Johnson Be Impeached, 1868

This, then, is the plain and inevitable issue before the Senate and the Americanpeople:

Has the President, under the Constitution, the more than kingly prerogativeat will to remove from office and suspend from office indefinitely, all executiveofficers of the United States, either civil, military, or naval, at any and all times,and fill the vacancies with creatures of his own appointment, for his own pur-poses, without any restraint whatever, or possibility of restraint by the Senate orby Congress through laws duly enacted?

The House of Representatives, in behalf of the people, join this issue byaffirming that the exercise of such powers is a high misdemeanor in office….

Who does not know that Andrew Johnson initiated, of his own will, acourse of reconstruction of the rebel States, which at the time be claimed wasprovisional only, and until the meeting of Congress and its action thereon?Who does not know that when Congress met and undertook to legislate uponthe very subject of reconstruction, of which he had advised them in his message,which they alone had the constitutional power to do, Andrew Johnson lastaforesaid again changed his course, and declared that Congress had no power tolegislate upon that subject; that the two houses had only the power separately tojudge of the qualifications of the members who might be sent to each by rebel-lious constituencies, acting under State organization which Andrew Johnson hadcalled into existence by his late fiat, the electors of which were voting by hispermission and under his limitations? Who does not know that when Congress,assuming its rightful power to propose amendments to the Constitution, hadpassed such an amendment, and had submitted it to the States as a measure ofpacification, Andrew Johnson advised and counselled the legislatures of the Stateslately in rebellion, as well as others, to reject the amendment, so that it might notoperate as a law, and thus establish equality of suffrage in all the States, andequality of right in the members of the electoral college, and in the number ofthe representatives to the Congress of the United States?…

Who does not know that from the hour he began these, his usurpations ofpower, he everywhere denounced Congress, the legality and constitutionality ofits action, and defied its legitimate powers, and, for that purpose, announced hisintentions and carried out his purpose, as far as he was able, of removing every trueman from office who sustained the Congress of the United States? And it is tocarry out this plan of action that he claims the unlimited power of removal, for

Trial of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, on Impeachment by the House of Representatives for High Crimes andMisdemeanors (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1868), 96, 121–123.



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the illegal exercise of which he stands before you this day. Who does not knowthat, in pursuance of the same plan, he used his veto power indiscriminately toprevent the passage of wholesome laws, enacted for the pacification of the countryand, when laws were passed by the constitutional majority over his vetoes, hemade the most determined opposition, both open and convert, to them, and, forthe purpose of making that opposition effectual, he endeavored to array and didarray all the people lately in rebellion to set themselves against Congress andagainst the true and loyal men, their neighbors, so that murders, assassinations,and massacres were rife all over the southern States, which he encouraged by hisrefusal to consent that a single murderer be punished, though thousands of goodmen have been slain; and further, that he attempted by military orders to preventthe execution of acts of Congress by the military commanders who were chargedtherewith. These and his concurrent acts show conclusively that his attempt toget the control of the military force of the government, by the seizing of theDepartment of War, was done in pursuance of his general design, if it were possi-ble, to overthrow the Congress of the United States; and he now claims by hisanswer the right to control at his own will, for the execution of this very design,every officer of the army, navy, civil, and diplomatic service of the United States.He asks you here, Senators, by your solemn adjudication to confirm him in thatright, to invest him with that power, to be used with the intents and for the pur-poses which he has already shown.

The responsibility is with you; that safeguards of the Constitution againstusurpation are in your hands; the interests and hopes of free institutions waitupon your verdict. The House of Representatives has done its duty. We havepresented the facts in the constitutional manner; we have brought the criminalto your bar, and demand judgment at your hands for his so great crimes.

Never again, if Andrew Johnson go quit and free this day, can the people ofthis or any other country by constitutional checks or guards stay the usurpationsof executive power.

I speak, therefore, not the language of exaggeration, but the words of truthand soberness, that the future political welfare and liberties of all men hang trem-bling on the decision of the hour.

7. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Questions Abolitionist Supportfor Female Enfranchisement, 1868

To what a depth of degradation must the women of this nation have fallen to bewilling to stand aside, silent and indifferent spectators in the reconstruction of thenation, while all the lower stratas of manhood are to legislate in their interests,political, religious, educational, social and sanitary, moulding to their untutoredwill the institutions of a mighty continent….

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Who Are Our Friends?” The Revolution, 15 (January 1868).

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While leading Democrats have been thus favorably disposed, what have ourbest friends said when, for the first time since the agitation of the question [theenfranchisement of women], they have had an opportunity to frame their ideasinto statutes to amend the constitutions of two States in the Union.

Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips, withone consent, bid the women of the nation stand aside and behold the salvationof the negro. Wendell Phillips says, “one idea for a generation,” to come up inthe order of their importance. First negro suffrage, then temperance, then theeight hour movement, then woman’s suffrage. In 1958, three generations hence,thirty years to a generation, Phillips and Providence permitting, woman’s suffragewill be in order. What an insult to the women who have labored thirty years forthe emancipation of the slave, now when he is their political equal, to propose tolift him above their heads. Gerrit Smith, forgetting that our great American ideais “individual rights,” in which abolitionists have ever based their strongest argu-ments for emancipation, says, this is the time to settle the rights of races; unlesswe do justice to the negro we shall bring down on ourselves another bloodyrevolution, another four years’ war, but we have nothing to fear from woman,she will not revenge herself!…

Horace Greeley has advocated this cause for the last twenty years, but to-dayit is too new, revolutionary for practical consideration. The enfranchisement ofwoman, revolutionizing, as it will, our political, religious and social condition, isnot a measure too radical and all-pervading to meet the moral necessities of thisday and generation.

Why fear new things; all old things were once new…. We live to do newthings! When Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation of emancipation, itwas a new thing. When the Republican party gave the ballot to the negro, itwas a new thing, startling too, to the people of the South, very revolutionaryto their institutions, but Mr. Greeley did not object to all this because itwas new….

And now, while men like these have used all their influence for the lastfour years, to paralyze every effort we have put forth to rouse the women ofthe nation, to demand their true position in the reconstruction, they trium-phantly turn to us, and say the greatest barrier in the way of your demand isthat “the women themselves do not wish to vote.” What a libel on the intelli-gence of the women of the nineteenth century. What means the 12,000 peti-tions presented by John Stuart Mill in the British Parliament from the firstwomen in England, demanding household suffrage? What means the late actionin Kansas, 10,000 women petitioned there for the right of suffrage, and 9,000votes at the last election was the answer. What means the agitation in everyState in the Union? In the very hour when Horace Greeley brought in his ad-verse report in the Constitutional Convention of New York, at least twentymembers rose in their places and presented petitions from every part of theState, demanding woman’s suffrage. What means that eloquent speech ofGeorge W. Curtis in the Convention, but to show that the ablest minds inthe State are ready for this onward step?



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8. Lucy McMillan, a Former Slave in South Carolina,Testifies About White Violence, 1871

SPARTANBURGH, SOUTH CAROLINA, July 10, 1871.

LUCY McMILLAN (colored) sworn and examined.

By the CHAIRMAN:

QUESTION. Where do you live?

ANSWER. Up in the country. I live on McMillan’s place, right at the foot ofthe road.

QUESTION. How far is it?

ANSWER. Twelve miles.

QUESTION. Are you married?

ANSWER. I am not married. I am single now. I was married. My husband wastaken away from me and carried off twelve years ago….

QUESTION. How old are you now?

ANSWER. I am called forty-six. I am forty-five or six.

QUESTION. Did the Ku-Klux come where you live at any time?

ANSWER. They came there once before they burned my house down. Theway it was was this: John Hunter’s wife came to my house onSaturday morning, and told they were going to whip me. I wasafraid of them; there was so much talk of Ku-Klux drowning people,and whipping people, and killing them. My house was only a littlepiece from the river, so I laid out at night in the woods. The Sundayevening after Isham McCrary was whipped I went up, and a whiteman, John McMillan, came along and says to me, “Lucy, you hadbetter stay at home, for they will whip you anyhow.” I said if theyhave to, they might whip me in the woods, for I am afraid to staythere. Monday night they came in and burned my house down; Idodged out alongside of the road not far off, and saw them. I wassitting right not far off, and as they came along the river I knowsome of them. I know John McMillan, and Kennedy McMillan, andBilly Bush, and John Hunter. They were all together. I was not faroff, and I saw them. They went right on to my house. When theypassed me I run further up on the hill to get out of the way of them.They went there and knocked down and beat my house a right smartwhile. And then they all got still, and directly I saw the fire rise.

Excerpt from Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late InsurrectionaryStates (Washington, 1872), printed in Dorothy Sterling. ed., Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words ofAfrican Americans. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

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QUESTION. How many of these men were there?

ANSWER. A good many; I couldn’t tell how many, but these I knew. Theothers I didn’t.

QUESTION. Were these on foot or on horseback?

ANSWER. These were walking that I could call the names of, but the otherswere riding. I work with these boys everyday. One of them I raisedfrom a child, and I knew them. I have lived with them twelve years.

QUESTION. How were they dressed?

ANSWER. They had just such cloth as this white cotton frock made into oldgowns; and some had black faces, and some red, and some had hornson their heads before, and they came a-talking by me and I knewtheir voices.

QUESTION. How far were you from where they were?

ANSWER. Not very far. I was in the woods, squatted down, and staid still untilthey passed; but then I run further up the hill.

QUESTION. Have you any family with you there?

ANSWER. I had one little daughter with me. I had one grown daughter, but mygrown daughter had been up the country to my mother’s staying,and my little girl was staying there with me.

QUESTION. Had you your little girl out with you?

ANSWER. Yes, sir; I could not leave her there.

QUESTION. What was the reason given for burning your house?

ANSWER. There was speaking down there last year and I came to it. They allkept at me to go. I went home and they quizzed me to hear whatwas said, and I told them as far as my senses allowed me.

QUESTION. Where was the speaking?

ANSWER. Here in this town. I went on and told them, and then they all said Iwas making laws; or going to have the land, and the Ku-Klux weregoing to beat me for bragging that I would have land. John Huntertold them on me, I suppose, that I said I was going to have land….

9. Father Abram Ryan Proclaims Undying Lovefor the Confederate States of America, 1879

C. S. A.

Do we weep for the heroes who died for us?

Who living were true and tried for us,

And dying sleep side by side for us;—

Father Ryan’s Poems (Mobile: John L. Rapier and Company Publishers, 1879).



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The Martyr-band

That hallowed our land

With the blood they shed in a tide for us.

Ah! fearless on many a day for us

They stood in the front of the fray for us,

And held the foeman at bay for us,

And tears should fall

Fore’er o’er all

Who fell while wearing the gray for us.

How many a glorious name for us,

How many a story of fame for us,

They left,—would it not be a blame for us,

If their memories part

From our land and heart,

And a wrong to them, and shame for us?

No—no—no—they were brave for us,

And bright were the lives they gave for us,—

The land they struggled to save for us

Will not forget

Its warriors yet

Who sleep in so many a grave for us.

On many and many a plain for us

Their blood poured down all in vain for us,

Red, rich and pure,—like a rain for us;

They bleed,—we weep,

We live,—they sleep—

“All Lost”—the only refrain for us,

But their memories e’er shall remain for us,

And their names, bright names, without stain for us,—

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The glory they won shall not wane for us,

In legend and lay

Our heroes in gray

Shall forever live over again for us.

10. Francis Miles Finch Mourns and CelebratesCivil War Soldiers from the South and North, 1867

The Blue and the Gray

By the flow of the inland river,

Whence the fleets of iron have fled,

Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,

Asleep are the ranks of the dead:

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment-day;

Under the one, the Blue,

Under the other, the Gray….

From the silence of sorrowful hours

The desolate mourners go,

Lovingly laden with flowers

Alike for the friend and the foe;



Under the roses, the Blue,

Under the lilies, the Gray.

So with an equal splendor,

The morning sun-rays fall,

With a touch impartially tender,

On the blossoms blooming for all:

Frances M. Finch, “The Blue and the Gray: And Other Verses” (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 1–3.



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Broidered with gold, the Blue,

Mellowed with gold, the Gray.

So, when the summer calleth,

On forest and field of grain,

With an equal murmur falleth

The cooling drip of the rain:


Waiting the judgment-day,

Wet with the rain, the Blue

Wet with the rain, the Gray.

Sadly, but not with upbraiding,

The generous deed was done,

In the storm of the years that are fading

No braver battle was won:



Under the blossoms, the Blue,

Under the garlands, the Gray

No more shall the war cry sever,

Or the winding rivers be red;

They banish our anger forever

When they laurel the graves of our dead!


Waiting the judgment-day,

Love and tears for the Blue,

Tears and love for the Gray.

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E S S A Y S

The collapse of Reconstruction had enormous costs for the African-Americanpopulation of the South. Arguably, its failure also postponed the economic andsocial recovery of the entire region until well into the twentieth century. Histor-ians have long debated the meaning of Reconstruction and particularly the rea-sons for its abandonment. In the first essay, Steven Hahn of the University ofPennsylvania shows that former slaves and Confederates were both prepared tomount an armed defense of their goals, reflecting a long tradition of Southernviolence that had previously undergirded slavery. He argues that Reconstructioncame to an end when freedmen lost the military support of the North, whichhad tired of the sixteen-year conflict (1861–1877). Essentially, the freedmenwere outgunned. David W. Blight of Yale University takes a somewhat differenttack. He depicts Reconstruction as a process in which two important but incom-patible goals vied for attention: reconciliation and emancipation. The nationneeded to heal the sectional divide in order to function as one country, yet ithad also fought the war, at least in part, to bring justice to the former slaves. Asit turned out, Southern resistance narrowed the terms on which reconciliationwas possible. The emancipationist promise of the war was stunted as a result,and eventually forgotten in the attempt to minimize the differences between“the Blue and the Gray.” Reconstruction became a contest over the memoryand meaning of the war. Black southerners lost.

Continuing the War: White and Black ViolenceDuring Reconstruction

STEVEN HAHN

In March 1867, nearly two years after the Confederate armies had begun to sur-render and more than a year after Congress had refused to seat representativesfrom the former Confederate states, the mark of Radicalism was indelibly in-scribed into the cornerstone of the reconstructed American republic. It did notherald the draconian policies—imprisonments and executions, massive disfran-chisement, or confiscation of landed estates—that some Republicans had advo-cated and many Rebels had initially feared. And it required a combination ofwhite southern arrogance and vindictiveness, presidential intransigence, andmounting African American agitation before it could be set. But with the Mili-tary Reconstruction Acts, Congress gave the federal government unprecedentedpower to reorganize the ex-Confederate South politically, imposed political dis-abilities on leaders of the rebellion, and, most stunning of all, extended the elec-tive franchise to southern black males, the great majority of whom had been

Reprinted by permission of the publisher from A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South bySteven Hahn, pp. 165, 177, 178–181, 183, 184, 186, 189, 190, 219, 224–226, 265–269, 280, 281, 286, 288–292, 307,308, 310–312, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2003 by the Presidentand Fellows of Harvard College.



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slaves. Never before in history, and nowhere during the Age of Revolution, hadso large a group of legally dependent people been enfranchised….

By the summer of 1867, complaints of “armed organizations among thefreedmen,” of late-hour drilling, and of threatening “assemblages” had grownboth in volume and geographical scope. The entire plantation South appearedto pulse with militant and quasi-military activity. But now, in the months afterthe passage of the Reconstruction Acts, investigation revealed a more formalprocess of politicization, and one tied directly to the extension of the electivefranchise and the organizational initiatives of the Republican party. FromVirginia to Georgia, from the Carolinas to the Mississippi Valley and Texas, thefreed people showed “a remarkable interest in all political information,” were“fast becoming thoroughly informed upon their civil and political rights,” and,most consequentially, were avidly “organizing clubs and leagues throughout thecounties.” Of these, none was more important to the former slaves or moreemblematic of the developing character of local politics in the postemancipationSouth than the often vilified and widely misunderstood body known as theUnion League.

Emerging out of a network of organizations formed in the northern states in1862 and 1863 to rally public support for the Lincoln administration and the wareffort, the Union League embraced early the practices of both popular andpatrician politics. Bound by secrecy, requiring oaths and rituals much in themanner of the Masons, and winning a mass base through local councils acrossthe Midwest and Northeast, the league also took hold among loyalist elitesmeeting in stately clubs and townhomes in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.In May 1863, a national convention defined goals, drew up a constitution, andelected officers, and councils were soon being established in Union-occupiedareas of the Confederate South to advance the cause. Once the war ended, theleague continued its educational and agitational projects and spread most rapidlyamong white Unionists in southern hill and mountain districts, where member-ship could climb into the thousands. But committed as the league was “to prot-ect, strengthen, and defend all loyal men without regard to sect, condition, orrace,” it began as well to sponsor political events and open a few councils forthe still unfranchised African Americans—chiefly in larger cities like Richmond,Norfolk, Petersburg, Wilmington, Raleigh, Savannah, Tallahassee, Macon, andNashville.

With the provision for a black franchise and voter registration encoded inthe Reconstruction Acts, league organizers quickly fanned out from these urbanareas into the smaller towns and surrounding countryside, and particularly intothe plantation belt….

It was arduous and extremely dangerous work, for as organizers trekked outto where the mass of freedpeople resided, they fell vulnerable to swift and deadlyretaliation at the hands of white landowners and vigilantes. Having organized theMount Olive Union League Council in Nottoway County, Virginia, in July of1867, the Reverend John Givens reported that a “colored speaker was killedthree weeks ago” in neighboring Lunenberg County. But Givens determinedto “go there and speak where they have cowed the black man,” hoping “by

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the help of God” to “give them a dose of my radical Republican pills and neu-tralize the corrosive acidity of their negro hate.”…

The formation of a Union League council officially required the presence ofat least nine loyal men, each twenty-one years of age or older, who were, uponinitiation, to elect a president and other officers from among those regarded as“prudent, vigilant, energetic, and loyal,” and as “possess[ing] the confidence oftheir fellow citizens.” They were expected to hold meetings weekly, to followthe ceremony, and to “enlist all loyal talent in their neighborhood.”…

The experience and operations of local councils depended to some extenton the training and ability of the organizer, but perhaps even more on the socialand political conditions in the specific counties and precincts. In hilly RutherfordCounty, North Carolina, where only one in five inhabitants was black andwhere the Whig party had been dominant before the Civil War, the Union Lea-gue seemed to function—at least initially—in an unusually open and relaxedmanner. One Saturday a month at noon, the courthouse bell in the village ofRutherfordton would be rung to announce a meeting and summon “every citi-zen who wished to come.” Membership in the league was not concealed andsome men who had served in the Confederate army belonged….

Yet where blacks made up between one-third and two-thirds of thepopulation—and where, not incidentally, the great majority of Union Leaguecouncils was to be found—the situation was rather different. Here, mostleague members were black and they encountered a substantial and largelyantagonistic population of whites. Whether they met weekly, biweekly, ormonthly (and there was considerable variation), they relied on word of mouthrather than bells, horns, or posters; they usually assembled at night; and theygenerally favored sites that would attract as little adverse attention as possible,often posting armed sentinels outside. Some league councils either organizedtheir own drilling companies or linked with companies that already existed.One observer in the South Carolina piedmont district of Abbeville fretfullyreported that local leagues with “their Captains, and other Officers,” weremeeting “with their Guns … in secret places, but do not meet twice in thesame place.” Recognizing the dangers, the freedman Caleb, who worked fora particularly hostile landowner in Maury County, Tennessee, where blacksformed just under half of the population, chose another course: he went tohis employe in April 1867 “and whol[l]y den[i]ed having any thing to dowith the Un[i]on League,” insisting that he “has not joined it nor neverwill.”…

The Union League sprang to life through the plantation districts because itsgoal of mobilizing black support for the national government and the Republi-can party fed on and nourished the sensibilities and customs that organizers foundin many African American communities. League councils served as crucial polit-ical schools, educating newly enfranchised blacks in the ways of the official po-litical culture. New members not only were instructed in the league’s history, inthe “duties of American citizenship,” and in the role of th[e] Republican partyin advancing their freedom, but also learned about “parliamentary law and de-bating,” about courts, juries, and militia service, about the conduct of elections



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and of various political offices, and about important events near and far. Withmeetings often devoted, in part, to the reading aloud of newspapers, pamphlets,and government decrees, freedmen gained a growing political literacy even ifmost could neither read nor write….

Indeed, league councils quickly constituted themselves as vehicles not onlyof Republican electoral mobilization, but also of community development, de-fense, and self-determination. In Harnett County, North Carolina, they formeda procession “with fife and drum and flag and banner” and demanded the returnof “any colored children in the county bound to white men.” In OktibbehaCounty, Mississippi, they organized a cooperative store, accepting “corn andother products … in lieu of money,” and, when a local black man suffered arrest,“the whole League” armed and marched to the county seat. In RandolphCounty, Alabama, and San Jacinto County, Texas, they worked to establish localschools so that, as one activist put it, “every colored man [now] beleaves in theLeage.”…

Among the diverse activities that Union League councils across the formerConfederate South pursued in 1867, few commanded more immediate attentionthan those required to implement the provisions and goals of the ReconstructionActs. Within months, the Republican party had to be organized in the states andcounties, delegates had to be nominated and elected to serve in state constitu-tional conventions, new state constitutions enfranchising black men and investingstate governments with new structures and responsibilities had to be written andratified, and the general congressional expectations for readmission to the Unionhad to be fulfilled. First and foremost, the outlines of a new body politic had tobe drawn and legitimated through a process of voter registration….

During Reconstruction, black men held political office in every state of theformer Confederacy. More than one hundred won election or appointment toposts having jurisdiction over entire states, ranging from superintendent of edu-cation, assistant commissioner of agriculture, superintendent of the deaf anddumb asylum, and member of the state land commission to treasurer, secretaryof state, state supreme court justice, and lieutenant governor. One African Amer-ican even sat briefly as the governor of Louisiana. A great many more—almosteight hundred—served in the state legislatures. But by far the largest number ofblack officeholders were to be found at the local level: in counties, cities, smallermunicipalities, and militia districts. Although a precise figure is almost impossibleto obtain, blacks clearly filled over 1,100 elective or appointive local offices, andthey may well have filled as many as 1,400 or 1,500, about 80 percent of whichwere in rural and small-town settings….

Union League and Republican party activists therefore had to prepare care-fully for election day lest their other efforts be nullified. They had to petitionmilitary commanders and Republican governors to appoint favorable (and dis-miss hostile) election officials and to designate suitable polling sites, particularlyif Democrats still controlled county governing boards. They had to get their vo-ters to the polls, at times over a distance of many miles, and make sure that thosevoters received the correct tickets. They had to minimize the opportunities forbribery, manipulation, and intimidation. And they had to oversee the counting

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of ballots. Voting required, in essence, a military operation. Activists often calleda meeting of fellow leaguers or club members the night before an election toprovide instructions and materials. The chairman of the Tunica County, Missis-sippi, Republican executive committee had men come to the town of Hernandofrom all over the county on the day before the election and distribute tickets tothose political clubs meeting that night. At times groups of black voters mightspend the night before an election on a safe plantation or in the woods, perhapssending a small party ahead to check for possible traps or ambushes, and thenmove out at first light to arrive at the polls well before their opponents or “rebelspies” could gather. Henry Frazer, who organized for the Republican party inBarbour County, Alabama, claimed that he went out with as many as “450men and camped at the side of the road” before going into the town of Eufaulaat eight in the morning where they would “stand in a body until they got achance to vote.”…

Protecting black Republican voters from white intimidation was only themost obvious goal of such martial organization and display, however. Therewas also the need to prod the timid and punish the apathetic or disloyal withintheir own communities. Activists learned early that elections could only be car-ried by securing overwhelming allegiance to the Republican party and then byensuring that the eligible voters overcame fear or inertia to cast ballots. Politicalparades and torchlight processions during election campaigns and on the eve ofpolling—often with black men dressed in their club uniforms, beating drums,“hallooing, hooping,” and, on occasion, riding full gallop through the streets—thereby served several purposes: to inspire enthusiasm, advertise numbers and re-solve, and coax the participation of those who might otherwise abstain. Wherecoaxing proved insufficient, more coercive tactics could be deployed. UnionLeague members in a North Carolina county, upon learning of three or fourblack men who “didn’t mean to vote,” threatened to “whip them” and “madethem go.” In another county, “some few colored men who declined voting”were, in the words of a white conservative, “bitterly persecute[ed].” One suf-fered insults, the destruction of his fences and crops, and “other outrages.”

Especially harsh reprisals could be brought against blacks who aligned withconservatives and Democrats, for they were generally regarded not merely as op-ponents but as “traitors.” As black Mississippian Robert Gleed put it, “[W]edon’t believe they have a right to acquiesce with a party who refuse to recognizetheir right to participate in public affairs.” In the rural hinterlands of Portsmouth,Virginia, black Republicans attacked “colored conservatives” at a prayer meetingand beat two of them badly. In southside Virginia’s Campbell County, a blackman who betrayed the Union League was tied up by his heels and suspendedfrom a tree for several hours until he agreed to take an oath of loyalty….

When the U.S. Congress conducted an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan inthe early 1870s, more than a few of the reputed leaders testified that the organi-zation was a necessary response to the alarming activities and tactics of the UnionLeague. They complained of secret oaths, clandestine meetings, accumulationsof arms, nocturnal drilling, threatening mobilizations, and a general flaunting ofcivilities among former slaves across the plantation South. In so doing, they



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helped construct a discourse, later embraced by apologists for slavery and whitesupremacy, that not only justified vigilantism but also demonized Radical Re-construction for its political illegitimacies. The enfranchisement of ignorant anddependent freedmen by vengeful outsiders, the Klansmen insisted, marked a ba-sic corruption of the body politic and a challenge to order as it was widelyunderstood….

Ku Klux Klan leaders and sympathizers who blamed the Union League fortheir resort to vigilantism were at least right about the chronology. Union Lea-gue mobilizations generally preceded the appearance of the Klan. But the char-acter and activities of the league itself reflected a well-established climate ofparamilitarism that assumed both official and unofficial forms. Already duringthe summer and fall of 1865, despite the presence of a Union army of occupa-tion, bands of white “regulators,” “scouts,” and cavalrymen rode the countrysidedisciplining and disarming freedpeople who looked to harvest their crops, makenew labor and family arrangements, and perhaps await a federally sponsored landredistribution….

From the first, the Klan proved particularly attractive to young, white menwho had served in the Confederate army. All of the founders in Pulaski, Ten-nessee, were youthful Confederate veterans, and most everywhere former Con-federate officers, cavalrymen, and privates sparked organization and composedthe bulk of membership. Klan dens and other vigilante outfits often becamemagnets for returning soldiers and, at times, they virtually mirrored the remain-ders of specific Confederate companies. Powell Clayton, the Republican gover-nor of Arkansas who effectively combated the Klan, complained in retrospectabout the Confederates being paroled or allowed to desert without surrenderingtheir arms, ammunition, and horses. To this extent, the Klan not only came toembody the anger and displacement of a defeated soldiery and to capitalize onthe intensely shared experiences of battlefields and prison camps; it also may beregarded as a guerilla movement bent on continuing the struggle or avenging theconsequences of the official surrender.

But the very associations between the Klan and the Confederate army suggesta deeper historical and political context, for Confederate mobilization itself wasenabled by longstanding and locally based paramilitary institutions. Militias wereperhaps most important because state governments required the enrollment of allable-bodied white men while leaving much of the organizational initiative tocounties and neighborhoods, where volunteer companies could elect their ownofficers, make their own by-laws, and then secure recognition by the legislature.The militias, in turn, were closely connected with slave patrols—for a time throughformal control, and more generally by way of personnel and jurisdiction—whichpoliced the African American population, instructed all white men in their respon-sibilities as citizens in a slave society, and could be enlisted as something of a posseby the state in the event of emergency. A martial spirit and military presence thussuffused the community life of the antebellum South….

The geography of Klan activity was, in essence, a map of political struggle inthe Reconstruction South. Klan-style vigilantism surfaced at some point almostanywhere that a substantial Republican constituency—and especially a black

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Republican constituency—was to be found: from Virginia to Florida, SouthCarolina to Texas, Arkansas to Kentucky. Reports of “outrages” and “depreda-tions” emanated from areas that were heavily black (eastern North Carolina,west-central Alabama), heavily white (east Tennessee, northwest Georgia), andracially mixed (eastern Mississippi, northwest South Carolina, east-central Texas).But whether the eruptions were brief or prolonged and whether they achievedtheir objectives depended on the nature and effectiveness of black resistance and,by extension, the readiness of the state Republican governments to respond withnecessary force….

Union Leagues and Republican party clubs had, in some places, already be-gun to mount a response to Klan violence, at times bringing pressure againstsuspected Klan leaders. Black members of a Pickens County, Alabama, UnionLeague boycotted a white landowner thought to be “head of the Ku Klux.”They were so effective that, in his words, he “could not hire a darkey at anyprice.” In a number of locales scattered across the plantation districts, they appearto have taken even more direct and destructive action by torching the mills,barns, and houses of former slaveholders. But the leagues and clubs more likelymoved to put themselves on a paramilitary footing, if they had not embracedrituals of armed self-defense from the outset. Black Union Leaguers in DarlingtonCounty, South Carolina, fearing Klan violence, gathered weapons, took controlof a town, and threatened to burn it down in the event of attack. Near Macon,Mississippi, the combination of local outrages and the very bloody Meridian riotled blacks to organize “secretly” and ready themselves to “meet the mob.”“There will be no more ‘Meridians’ in Mississippi,” a white ally of theirsdeclared. “Next time an effort of this kind is made there will be killing on bothsides.” The tenor of conflict and mobilization in Granville County, NorthCarolina, in the fall of 1868 was such that a prominent Democrat offeredUnion League members a bargain: “If we would stop the leagues he wouldstop the Ku Klux.”…

Like Tennessee, neighboring Arkansas had a white population majority, asolid base of Unionist sentiment in the mountains of the northwest, and aRepublican party that looked to punish former Confederates. But Arkansas hadbeen remanded to military rule by the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, and in thespring of 1868 eligible voters put Republicans in command of the general assem-bly and the carpetbagger Powell Clayton in the governor’s chair. A native ofPennsylvania and a civil engineer by training, Clayton had been out in Kansasduring the 1850s and commanded a Union cavalry regiment in Arkansas duringthe war, where he saw a good deal of action against Confederate guerrillas. Afterthe surrender, he settled in Arkansas and bought a plantation, but run-ins withex-Confederate neighbors led him into politics; he first helped to organize thestate Republican party and then accepted the party’s nomination for governor.By the time of Clayton’s inauguration in July, Klan activity was sufficiently pro-nounced in the southern and eastern sections of the state that he wasted no timein responding: with the approval of the legislature, he began mobilizing a statemilitia and, as intimidation of Republican voters and local officials intensified anda Republican congressman fell victim to a Klan ambush, he declared marital law



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in ten counties. Armed skirmishes between militiamen and Klansmen, togetherwith arrests, trials, and a few executions, followed. By early 1869, the Klan hadpretty well “ceased to exist” in Arkansas….

The accession of Republican Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency in March of1869 offered some welcome possibilities to those governors who stood ready todeploy state militia units. Previously, the Johnson administration had refused re-quests for arms, and governors were left scrambling to equip their troops. Arkan-sas’s Powell Clayton first tried to borrow guns from various northern states andthen, when this failed, sent an emissary to New York to purchase rifles and am-munition. Unfortunately, a contingent of well-prepared Klansmen interceptedthe shipment between Memphis and Little Rock. Florida’s carpetbag governorHarrison Reed chose to go personally to New York to procure arms soon afterthe legislature passed a militia law in August 1868, but the result was even moreembarrassing. Under the nose of a federal detachment, Klansmen boarded thetrain carrying the armaments to Tallahassee and destroyed them. Grant, on theother hand, proved more receptive than Johnson and made substantial supplies ofweapons available to Governors Holden and Scott in the Carolinas….

The Klan’s effectiveness depended on a wider political climate that gave lat-itude to local vigilantes and allowed for explosions of very public violence.Louisiana and Georgia, which alone among the reconstructed states supportedDemocrat Horatio Seymour for the presidency in 1868, had at least sevenbloody riots together with Klan raiding that summer and fall. The term “riot,”which came into wide use at this time, quite accurately captures the course andferocity of these eruptions, claiming as they did numerous lives, often over sev-eral days, in an expanding perimeter of activity. But “riot” suggests, as well, adisturbance that falls outside the ordinary course of political conduct, and so byinvoking or embracing it we may miss what such disturbances can reveal aboutthe changing dynamics and choreography of what was indeed ordinary politics inthe postemancipation South….

Consider the Camilla riot in southwest Georgia, which captured the greatestattention but shared many features of the others. In late August 1868, Republi-cans in the state’s Second Congressional District, most of whom were black, metin the town of Albany and nominated William P. Pierce, a former Union armyofficer, failed planter, and Freedmen’s Bureau agent, for Congress. It would notbe an easy campaign…. A “speaking” in the town of Americus on September 15brought menacing harassment from local whites and Pierce barely escaped vio-lence. But he did not interrupt plans for a similar event in Camilla on Saturday,September 19.

News of the rally—which would feature Pierce, several other white Repub-licans, and Philip Joiner, a former slave, local Loyal League president, and recentlyexpelled state legislator—circulated through the neighboring counties. So, too, didrumors of a possible attack by armed whites who, it was said, proclaimed that “thisis our country and we intend to protect it or die.” Freedpeople did have amplecause for alarm. Camilla, the seat of relatively poor, white-majority MitchellCounty in an otherwise black majority section of the state, crackled withtension. Gunfire had broken out there during the April 1868 elections, and

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many of the blacks had resolved that they would “not dare … go to town entirelyunarmed as they did at that time.” The white Republican leaders tried to quellthese fears when the Dougherty County contingent gathered on their plantationson Friday night the 18th; and as the group moved out on Saturday morning forthe twenty-odd mile trek to Camilla, most heeded the advice to leave theirweapons behind and avoid a provocation….

But to the whites of Camilla, such a procession could only constitute a“mob,” with no civil or political standing, and mean “war, revolution, insurrec-tion, or riot of some sort.” Once spotted on Saturday morning, it thereby sparkedanother round of rumors, these warning of an “armed body of negroes” headingtoward the town. Although evidence suggests that local Democrats had been busyfor at least two days accumulating weapons and preparing to respond with force,the rumors clearly sped the mobilization of the town’s “citizens,” who appointed acommittee to ride out with the sheriff and “meet the approaching crowd.” A tenseexchange followed, with the Republican leaders explaining that they only wished“to go peaceably into Camilla and hold a political meeting,” and the sheriff warn-ing them not to enter the town with arms….

Suddenly, a local drunkard, waving a double-barreled shotgun, ran out to thewagon and, significantly, demanded that the drumming (associated both with acitizens’ militia and slave communication) cease. A moment later he fired, and the“squads” of white townsmen immediately joined in. Freedmen who had gunsbriefly returned the volleys and then, with the others, commenced a desperate flightfor safety. The sheriff and his “deputies” followed them into the woods and swampswith deadly purpose, some looking for “that d——d Phil Joiner.” Joiner escaped,but eleven days later he reported that “the mobbing crowd is still going throughBaker County and every Colored man that is farming to his self or supporting thenominee of Grant and Colfax he either have to leave his home or be killed.”

Prospects for black retaliation briefly ran very high. As word of the shootingspread through Dougherty County that Saturday evening, agitated freedmen inAlbany sought out the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent. Some talked of going im-mediately to Camilla to rescue and protect those who remained at risk. A few hourslater, African Methodist minister Robert Crumley heatedly reminded his congre-gants that he had advised those bound for Camilla the night before not to go withfewer than 150 well-armed men, and then suggested traveling there en masse thenext day to “burn the earthy about the place.” The Freedmen’s Bureau agent man-aged to discourage such a course by promising a full investigation and urging hissuperiors in Atlanta to send federal troops. The investigation showed Camilla tobe a massacre that had left at least nine African Americans dead and many morewounded. But all that came out of Atlanta was a proclamation by Republican gov-ernor Rufus Bullock urging civil authorities to keep the peace and safeguard therights of the people. Election day proved to be remarkably quiet in southwestGeorgia because the contest was over well before. Only two Republicans botheredto cast ballots in Camilla, and the turnout was so low elsewhere in the district thatthe Democrats, despite being greatly outnumbered among eligible votes, registeredan official victory. There would be resurgences of local black power in the future,but this was the beginning of the end for Republican rule in Georgia….



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And yet we must not underestimate the extent and tenacity of black resistance.White toughs did, to their misfortune, in the village of Cainhoy, a short distancefrom Charleston. Attempting to intimidate a Republican speaker at a “joint discus-sion” in mid-October, they found themselves outgunned as well as outnumberedby a black crowd that included several militia companies. When the smoke cleared,five whites lay dead and as many as fifty had been wounded. Most in evidenceamong the coast, such militance was nonetheless to be found at various points inthe interior. As rifle club activity intensified in Barnwell County, a “company ofnegroes,” acting on their own authority, appropriated arms issued during GovernorScott’s administration and threaten[ed] to destroy the town” of Blackville. InDarlington County, a “negro militia company consisting,” according to a localDemocrat, “of the worst elements in this section,” continued to drill and cause “agreat deal of trouble,” coming in one instance to the aid of a favored trial justice.Sporadically, there were acts of arson and sabotage, ambushes and assaults….

The paramilitary politics of the Reconstruction South had previouslyproduced dual state governments in Louisiana (1872), Texas (1873), and Arkansas(1874), but in 1876-1877 they also provoked a national crisis of governance. Notonly were the state returns contested in both South Carolina and Louisiana, butthere, as well as in Florida, the electoral college returns were contested too, leavingthe outcome of the Presidential race—and control of the executive branch—indoubt. As Republicans and Democrats struggled to reach an accord before Grant’sterm expired in early March, tensions and threats that harked back to the winter of1860–1861 seemed to abound. Yet through all of this, what appeared to be takingshape was less a “compromise” than a shared political sensibility in northern rulingcircles that questioned the legitimacies of popular democracy. That sensibility hadalways been in evidence among conservatives and had spread during the 1850s,only to be pressed to the margins by the revolutionary mobilizations of the 1860s.It now expressed itself as weariness with the issues of Reconstruction, as skepticismabout the capabilities of freedpeople, as concerns about the expansion of federalpowers, as revulsion over political corruption, and, especially, as exasperation withthe “annual autumnal outbreaks” in the Deep South and the consequent use offederal troops to maintain Republican regimes there.

It required elaborate fictions and willful ignorance for critics to argue, as somedid, that the military had no business rejecting the popular will in the South. For ifdetachments of federal troops at the statehouses in Columbia, South Carolina, andNew Orleans, Louisiana, alone enabled Republicans to hand onto the last threadsof power, their Democratic rivals made no effort to conceal their own dependenceon superior force of arms. In Louisiana, Democratic gubernatorial claimant andformer Confederate brigadier general Francis T. Nicholls quickly demonstratedhis understanding of political necessities. He designated local White League unitsas the legal state militia, commandeered the state arsenal, and took control of theNew Orleans police. In South Carolina, Wade Hampton’s allies succeeded in gar-risoning the state capitol with as many as six thousand Red Shirts, while rifle clubsdrove out Republican officeholders in upcountry counties….

The withdrawal of federal troops from the statehouses of South Carolina andLouisiana in April of 1877 did not therefore mark the end of their role in

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protecting the rights and property of American citizens; it only marked the endof their role, at least for nearly another century, in protecting the rights andproperty of African Americans and other working people….

Ending the War: The Push for National Reconciliation

DAVID W. BLIGHT

Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: howto understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas—healing andjustice. On some level, both had to occur; but given the potency of racial assump-tions and power in nineteenth-century America, these two aims never developedin historical balance. One might conclude that this imbalance between outcomes ofsectional healing and racial justice was simply America’s inevitable historical condi-tion, and celebrate the remarkable swiftness of the reunion, as Paul Buck did in hisinfluential book, The Road to Reunion (1937). But theories of inevitability—ofirrepressible conflicts or irrepressible reconciliations—and rarely satisfying. Humanreconciliations—when tragically divided people unify again around aspirations,ideas, and the positive bonds of nationalism—are to be cherished. But sometimesreconciliations have terrible costs, both intentional and unseen. The sectionalreunion after so horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenthcentury, but it could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many ofthose people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage. This is thetragedy lingering on the margins and infesting the heart of American history fromAppomattox to World War I….

Reconstruction was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of theverdict at Appomattox. The great challenge of Reconstruction was to determinehow a national blood feud could be reconciled at the same time a new nationemerged out of war and social revolution. The survivors on both sides, winnersand losers in the fullest sense, would still inhabit the same land and eventually thesame government. The task was harrowing: how to make the logic of sectionalreconciliation compatible with the logic of emancipation, how to square blackfreedom and the stirrings of racial equality with a cause (the South’s) that hadlost almost everything except its unbroken belief in white supremacy. Such aneffort required both remembering and forgetting. During Reconstruction,many Americans increasingly realized that remembering the war, even the ha-treds and deaths on a hundred battlefields—facing all those graves on MemorialDay—became, with time, easier than struggling over the enduring ideas forwhich those battles had been fought….

Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W.Blight, pp. 3, 31, 44–47, 51, 64, 65, 69–71, 77–81, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 97, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Pressof Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.



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In the immediate aftermath of the war, defeated and prostrate, it appeared tomany that white Southerners would accept virtually any conditions or terms laidupon them. This was the initial conclusion of the northern journalist WhitelawReid, who believed that even black suffrage would be “promptly accepted”—that is, until he observed white Southern defiance revived by President Johnson’sconciliatory Reconstruction measures. After his Southern tour, Reid left a mixedwarning to policymakers about the disposition of white Southerners in 1866.“The simple truth is,” Reid concluded, “they stand ready to claim everything,if permitted, and to accept anything, if required.” Other Northern journalistsobserving the South reached similar conclusions. The initial war-bludgeonedcompliance on the part of white Southerners gave way within a year to whatTrowbridge called a “loyalty … of a negative sort: it is simply disloyaltysubdued.” A correspondent for the New York Tribune reported from Raleigh,North Carolina, that “the spirit of the Rebellion is not broken though its poweris demolished.” And a Northerner who had just returned from six months inSouth Carolina and Georgia informed Thaddeus Stevens in February 1866 that“the spirit which actuated the traitors … during the late rebellion is only sub-dued and allows itself to be nourished by leniency.”

Against this backdrop, Andrew Johnson offered to the South his rapidReconstruction policy. In late May 1865, Johnson announced his plan for thereadmission of Southern states. It included a broad provision for amnesty andpardon for those participants in the rebellion who would take a loyalty oath tothe Union. High-ranking ex-Confederate government officials were excludedfrom pardons for the time being, as were all Southerners who owned $20,000or more worth of property. The latter group had to apply personally to thePresident for a pardon. Johnson’s plan further required each former Confederatestate to call a convention to revise its antebellum constitution, renounce seces-sion, and accept the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery; they would thenbe promptly restored to the Union.

Johnson’s plan put enormous authority back in the hands of white Souther-ners, but without any provisions for black civil or political rights. Indeed, Johnsonhimself was a thoroughgoing white supremacist and a doctrinaire state rightist. Heopenly encouraged the South to draft its notorious Black Codes, laws enactedacross the South by the fall of 1865 that denied the freedmen political libertyand restricted their economic options and physical mobility. Designed as laborcontrols and a means for plantation discipline, such laws were part of the newconstitutions produced by these “Johnson governments,” and they expressedclearly white Southerners’ refusal to face the deeper meanings of emancipation.Presidential Reconstruction, as it evolved in 1865, allowed Southerners to recreategovernments of and for white men. Moreover, Johnson was openly hostile to theFreedmen’s Bureau, the agency created by Congress in the last months of the warto provide food, medical care, schools, and labor contract adjudication for thefreedpeople. The President overruled military and Freedmen’s Bureau efforts toredistribute some land from masters to ex-slaves. By the fall of 1865, pardonedex-Confederates were reclaiming their lands, and with such presidential encour-agement, reclaiming political power….

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Profoundly different memories and expectations collided in 1865-67, aspresidential Reconstruction collapsed and the Republicans in Congress wrestedcontrol of the process away from Johnson. “These people [white Southerners]are not loyal; they are only conquered,” wrote Union Brigadier General JamesS. Brisbin to Thaddeus Stevens in December 1865. “I tell you there is not asmuch loyalty in the South today as there was the day Lee surrendered to Grant.The moment they lost their cause in the field they set about to gain by politicswhat they had failed to obtain by force of arms.” Brisbin thought the BlackCodes would “reduce the blacks to a slavery worse than that from which theyjust escaped.” Johnson’s leniency seemed only to restore an old order and risklosing the very triumph that the Union forces had just won with so muchsacrifice….

The radical Republicans had a genuine plan for Reconstruction. Their ide-ology was grounded in the notion of an activist federal government, a redefini-tion of American citizenship that guaranteed equal political rights for black men,and faith in free labor in a competitive capitalist system. The radicals greatly ex-panded federal authority, fixing their vision, as Sumner put it, on “the generalprinciples” of “a national security and a national faith.” Their cardinal principlewas equality before the law, which in 1866 they enshrined in the Fourteen Amend-ment, expanding citizenship to all those born in the United States without regardto race. The same year Congress renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau over Johnson’sveto and passed the first civil rights act in American history.

Such legislation became reality because most Northerners were not ready toforget the results, and especially the sacrifices, of the war. The Southern states’ re-jection of the Fourteenth Amendment and Johnson’s repeated vetoes of Recon-struction measures (as well as his repudiation at the polls in the Congressionalelections of 1866) gave the radicals increased control over federal policy. In 1867Congress divided the ex-Confederate states into five military districts and madeblack suffrage a condition of readmission to the Union. By 1870 all ex-Confederate states had rejoined the Union, and in most, the Republican Party—built as a coalition of “carpetbaggers” (Northerners who moved South), “scalawags”(native Southerners who gave allegiance to the new order), and thousands of blackvoters—held the reins of state government. Indeed black voters were the coreconstituency of Southern Republicanism and the means of power in 1867–68….

As Congress engaged in the fateful debates over national policy in 1866–67,the floors of the House and Senate became arenas of warring memories. ManyRepublicans were clearly driven by a combination of retribution against theSouth, a desire to remake the Constitution based on black equality, and a questfor long-term political hegemony. Stevens left no doubt of his personal attitudetoward ex-slaveholders and ex-Confederates. “The murderers must answer tothe suffering race,” he said on May 8, 1866. “A load of misery must sit heavilyupon their souls.” The public debate in Congress was often sanguinary; it chal-lenged everyone’s ability to convert primal memory into public policy. ”I knowthat there is a morbid sensibility, sometimes called mercy,” declared Stevens,“which affects a few of all classes, from the priest to the clown, which hasmore sympathy for the murderer on the gallows than for his victim.” Yankee



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retribution never had a more vehement voice than Stevens, and no one everwaved the “bloody shirt” with greater zeal. “I am willing they shall come inwhen they are ready,” Stevens pronounced. “Do not, I pray you, admit thosewho have slaughtered half a million of our countrymen until their clothes aredried, and until they are reclad. I do not wish to sit side by side with men whosegarments smell of the blood of my kindred.”

“Bloody shirt” rhetoric lasted a long time in American politics; it was morethan a slogan, and in these early years, it had many uses and diverse practitioners.As both raw personal memory and partisan raw material, the “bloody shirt” wasa means to establish war guilt and a method through which to express war-induced hatreds….

Death and mourning were everywhere in America in 1865; hardly a familyhad escaped its pall. In the North, 6 percent of white males aged 13–43 had diedin the war; in the South, 18 percent were dead. Of the 180,000 African Amer-icans who served in the Union army and navy, 20 percent perished. Diseasessuch as typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia claimed more than twice as manysoldiers as did battle. The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughterand how to remember it.

Death on such a scale demanded meaning. During the war, soldiers incountless remote arbors, or on awful battlefield landscapes, had gathered tomourn and bury their comrades, even while thousands remained unburied, theirskeletons lying about on the killing fields of Virginia, Tennessee, or Georgia.Women had begun rituals of burial and remembrance in informal ways well be-fore the war ended, both in towns on the homefront and sometimes at the bat-tlefront. Americans carried flowers to graves or to makeshift monumentsrepresenting their dead, and so was born the ritual of “Decoration Day,” knowneventually also as Memorial Day.

In most places, the ritual was initially a spiritual practice. But very soon, re-membering the dead and what they died for developed partisan fault lines. Theevolution of Memorial Day during its first twenty years or so became a contestbetween three divergent, and sometimes overlapping, groups: blacks and theirwhite former abolitionist allies, white Northerners, and white Southerners Withtime, in the North, the war’s two great results—black freedom and the preserva-tion of the Union—were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquelyConfederate version of the war’s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruc-tion, coalesced around Memorial Day practice. Decoration Day, and the waysin which it was observed, shaped Civil War memory as much as any othercultural ritual. The story of the origins of this important American day ofremembrance is central to understanding how reconciliationist practices overtookthe emancipationist legacies of the Civil War….

The “First Decoration Day,” as this event came to be recognized in somecircles in the North, involved an estimated ten thousand people, most of themblack former slaves. During April, twenty-eight black men from one of the localchurches built a suitable enclosure for the burial ground at the Race Course. Insome ten days, they constructed a fence ten feet high, enclosing the burialground, and landscaped the graves into neat rows. The wooden fence was

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whitewashed and an archway was built over the gate to the enclosure. On thearch, painted in black letters, the workmen inscribed “Martyrs of the RaceCourse.” At nine o’clock in the morning on May 1, the procession to this specialcemetery began as three thousand black schoolchildren (newly enrolled in free-men’s schools) marched around the Race Course, each with an armload of rosesand singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by three hun-dred black women representing the Patriotic Association, a group organized todistribute clothing and other goods among the freedpeople. The women carriedbaskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses to the burial ground. The Mutual AidSociety, a benevolent association of black men, next marched in cadence aroundthe track and into the cemetery, followed by large crowds of white and blackcitizens….

According to a reminiscence written long after the fact, “several slight dis-turbances” occurred during the ceremonies on the first Decoration Day, as wellas “much harsh talk about the event locally afterward.” But a measure of howwhite Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of theirown creation of the practice a year later came fifty-one years afterward, whenthe president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an in-quiry for information about the May 1, 1865, parade. A United Daughters of theConfederacy official wanted to know if it was true that blacks and their whiteabolitionist friends had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwithresponded tersely: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official informationin answer to this.” In Southern and national memory, the first Decoration Daywas nearly lost in a grand evasion.

As a Northern ritual of commemoration, Memorial Day officially took holdin May 1868 and 1869, when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief ofthe Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), called on all Union veterans to con-duct ceremonies and decorate the graves of their dead comrades. In general or-ders issued each of the two springs, Logan called for a national commemorationunlike anything in American experience save possibly the Fourth of July. In“almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land,” charged Logan’scircular, those who died to “suppress the late rebellion” were to be honored an-nually “while a survivor of the war remains.” On May 30, 1868, when flowerswere plentiful, funeral ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183cemeteries in twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and townsin thirty-one states (including the South) arranged Decoration Day parades andorations. The observance grew manifold with time. In 1873, the New York leg-islature designated May 30 a legal holiday, and by 1890 every other Northernstate had followed its lead….

For white Southerners, Memorial Day was born amidst the despair of defeatand the need for collective expressions of grief. By 1866, local memorial associa-tions had formed in many Southern communities, organized largely by women.Some new cemeteries were founded near battlefields, while existing ones intowns and cities were expanded enormously to accommodate the dead. Inboth sections, but especially in the South, the first monuments erected tendedto be placed in cemeteries—the obvious sites of bereavement. By the 1890s,



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hardly a city square, town green, or even some one-horse crossroads lacked aCivil War memorial of some kind. But through most of the Reconstructionyears, the cemetery remained the public site of memorialization; obelisks andstone pyramids appeared as markers of the recent past that so haunted everycommunity. Often directed by social elites who could fund monuments, theSouthern “memorial movement … helped the South assimilate the fact ofdefeat,” as Gaines Foster writes, “without repudiating the defeated.”…

By the early 1870s, a group of ex-Confederate officers in Virginia hadforged a coalition of memorial groups that quickly took over the creation ofthe Lost Cause tradition. They did so through print as much as through ritualcommemorations. In 1866, former Confederate general Daniel H. Hill foundedthe magazine The Land We Love, a periodical devoted to demonstrating the skilland prowess of Confederate armies against all odds. By 1869, Hill’s journal hadbecome Southern Magazine, and most importantly, the Southern Historical Soci-ety (SHS) was founded as the vehicle for presenting the Confederate version ofthe war to the world. By 1876, the SHS began publishing its regular SouthernHistorical Society Papers, a series that ran for fourteen years under the editorshipof a former Confederate chaplain, John William Jones. The driving ideologicaland emotional force behind the SHS was the former Confederate general JubalEarly. Early had fled to Mexico at the end of the war and vowed never to returnto his native Virginia under the federal flag. Despite such bluster, and because ofthreatening poverty, Early returned to his hometown of Lynchburg in 1869. Hemade himself, as Gaines Foster observes, into the “prototypical unreconstructedRebel.” His principle aim was not only to vindicate Southern secession and glo-rify the Confederate soldier, but also to launch a propaganda assault on popularhistory and memory….

In the South, monument unveiling days took on a significance equal to, ifnot greater than, Memorial Day. In Richmond, Virginia, on October 26, 1875,Confederate veterans by the thousands staged their first major coming-out as acollective force. At the unveiling of the first significant monument to a Confed-erate hero, a standing statue of Stonewall Jackson sculpted by the British artistT. H. Foley, nearly fifty thousand people gathered for an unprecedented paradeand a ceremony….

At major intersections on the parade route, veterans, ladies memorial associa-tions, and “the indefatigable K.K.K.” (Ku Klux Klan) had assembled artisans toconstruct arches and towers with elaborate decorations honoring Jackson. Thelargest arch, at Grace and Eighth Streets, included huge letters that read: “Warrior,Christian, Patriot.” Above the inscription was a painting representing a stone wall,“upon which was resting a bare saber, a Bible, and a Confederate cap.”…

One dispute among the planners of the Jackson statue unveiling nearly de-railed the event. Governor Kemper was the grand marshal of the ceremonies andhad carefully planned the parade to the Capitol Square in Richmond. Kemperwas nervous that “nothing shall appear on the 26th to hurt the party” (Demo-crats). He feared that the “least excess” in the Confederate celebration wouldgive yet another “bloody shirt” to Northern Republicans, and he asked the lea-ders of the Confederate veterans to restrain their displays of battle flags. Only

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days before the big event, Jubal Early wrote to Kemper complaining of rumorsthat black militia companies and civilians were to be “allowed in the procession.”“I am inexpressibly shocked at the idea,” said Early. He considered the involve-ment of blacks “an indignity to the memory of Jackson and an insult to theConfederates.” Black Richmonders, the total of which Early judged to bebetween twenty thousand and thirty thousand, would swarm into the square,he believed, and whites would be forced to “struggle for place with bucknegroes … anxious to show their consequence.” Believing that blacks wouldwave “pictures of Lincoln and Fifteenth Amendment banners,” Early threatenednot to attend, and to take other veterans with him, if Kemper executed the plan.

In ferocious responses, Kemper told Early to mind his own business andbegged him to “stay at home.” Black militia officers and ministers in Richmondhad petitioned Kemper to take part in the procession. For racial “peace” in thecity, the governor accepted the petitioners’ request. The small contingent ofblacks were placed at the extreme rear of a parade several miles long, numberingmany thousands of white marchers…. The position of blacks in this bitter argu-ment between the ultimate irreconcilable [ Jubal Early] and a redeemer-reconciliationist governor remained utterly subordinate. One would eliminatethem altogether from Confederate memory; the other would declare them loyaland dispatch them to the rear of parades. In the long history of Lost Cause tradi-tion, both got their wish.

As the immense crowd assembled at the state capital grounds where theJackson monument was to be unveiled, Kemper welcomed them as theDemocrat-redeemer governor of Virginia. He announced that Jackson was a na-tional hero, not merely a Southern saint, whose memory was to be a “commonheritage of glory” for both sections. The massive ceremony served as the South’sreminder to the North of its insistence on “respect.” The unveiling declared, ineffect, that Reconstruction, as Northern Republicans had imagined it, wasover….

In 1874–75, Union and Confederate veterans began to participate in Memo-rial Day exercises together in both North and South. In the wake of MemorialDay, 1875, in North Carolina, a black citizen in Raleigh, Osborne Hunter, anx-iously observed in a letter to a newspaper “a noticeable spirit of reconciliationpervading the political atmosphere of both the Republican and Democratic par-ties of this state.” In August 1874, the Democrats had regained power in NorthCarolina, and the highly racialized election had hinged, in part, on Southernresistance to federal enforcement of black civil rights. Until May 1875, blacks inRaleigh had always played a major role in Decoration Day ceremonies in thatcity. That year they were discouraged from participating, as the occasion wasdeclared to be only a “soldier’s turn-out.” At the mark of a “decade in the historyof freedom,” concluded Hunter, Decoration Day seemed to be only an occasionfor “ignoring the colored citizen and the colored voter.”…

The disputed election of 1876 and the electoral crisis that culminated in theCompromise of 1877 brought the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the pres-idency, as well as the final three remaining Southern states not under Democraticcontrol into that party’s fold. Reconciliation seemed to sweep over the country’s



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political spirit, as the Union survived another potential severing by sectional andpartisan strife. Although it was hardly the first time that commentators in bothsections had declared the final conclusion to the issues of the war, the politicalsettlement of 1877 easily took its place as the traditional “end” of Reconstruc-tion (a label it has carried ever since).

On Memorial Day, May 30, 1877, New York City experienced an array ofparades and ceremonies unprecedented since the formal inception of the holidaynine years earlier. Virtually every orator and editorial writer declared the day oneof forgetting, forgiveness, and equality of the Blue and the Gray veterans….

Decoration Day, 1877 in New York culminated with a special indoor eventat the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The planning committee, dominated bydemocrats, had invited the prominent ex-Confederate general, lawyer, and thenBrooklyn resident Roger A. Pryor to be orator of the evening. A committeemember, Joseph Neilson, opened the proceedings with an explicit appeal forreconciliation. Neilson declared all the “causes” of the “late domestic contention”forgotten. As the voice of “healing,” Pryor took the podium before an audience ofnearly one thousand to deliver his extraordinary address, “The Soldier, the Friendof Peace and Union.”…

Unlike many Memorial Day orators, Pryor did not hide the issue of racebehind a rhetoric of reunion. The war had nothing directly to do with slavery,he proclaimed, in what became an article of faith to Southern vindicationists andtheir Northern allies. Southerners were comfortably reconciled to the destructionof slavery because it had only been the “occasion not the cause of secession.”Slavery was an impersonal force in history, a natural phenomenon subject onlyto divine control and beyond all human responsibility. It was good while itlasted, good once it was gone; no Southerner fought in its defense, and noNortherner died to end it. It just went away, like a change in the weather….

Following Pryor, former Union general Isaac S. Catlin delivered the finaladdress of the evening. In full sympathy with the former Confederate’s speech,Catlin spoke of military pathos and glory, of the victimhood and heroism of allsoldiers on both sides. “I love the memory of a soldier,” said Catlin. “I love thevery dust that covers his mouldering body.” Catlin called on all to be “exultant”that slavery was dead. “Is this not enough?” he asked. “Is it not enough that weare all American citizens, that our country is saved, that our country is one?” Inthis doctrine of “enough,” the emancipationist legacy of the war had becomebad taste among gentlemen soldiers. The “divine doctrine of forgiveness andconciliation” was the order of the day.

Dissent from this Blue-Gray reconciliationist version of the war’s memory,while now on the margins, was by no means silenced in the larger culture or inNew York. One year later, as though they had decided to invite a direct responseto Pryor and his ilk, the integrated Abraham Lincoln Post of the GAR askedFrederick Douglass to address them in Madison Square on Decoration Day. Ashe did on so many occasions during the last quarter of his life, Douglass rose tothe challenge with fire and indignation, offering an alternative, emancipationistmemory of the war. “There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war,”insisted Douglass “that no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.”… The

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reconciliationists were using memory to send the nation down the wrong road toreunion, he believed. Douglass had no patience for endless tales of Southern woes.“The South has suffered to be sure,” he said, “but she has been the author of herown suffering.”…

The story of Civil War memory and the ritual of Decoration Days contin-ued well beyond 1885 with the emancipationist legacy fighting endless rearguardactions against a Blue-Gray reconciliation that was to sweep through Americanculture. Those who remembered the war as the rebirth of the republic in thename of racial equality would continue to do battle with the growing numberwho would remember it as the nation’s test of manhood and the South’s struggleto sustain white supremacy.

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss, eds., The Facts of Reconstruction (1991).

Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction(1974).

Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism,1865–1898 (2005).

Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997).

Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (1990).

Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the CivilWar (1997).

Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and theBetrayal of Reconstruction (2008).

Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979).

Moon Ho-Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Ageof Emancipation (2008).

Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption (1984).

Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North (2001).

Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after theCivil War (2008).

Jonathan Wiener, Social Origins of the New South (1978).

